Bill Gammage on how Australia was the Biggest Estate on Earth

Before white settlement Indigenous people had managed the Australian landscape to the point that it resembled an English estate, according to historian Bill Gammage.

Richard spoke about how Australia looked before settlement with the author of one his favourite books, 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', Professor Gammage, who also features in the ABC Mini-series, First Footprints.

Contrary to the belief that the Indigenous people of the period maintained Australia's wilderness through "stepping lightly," Professor Gammage argues "they were active interveners in the land."

"If you let land go, sooner or later most of it is going to revert to trees and then thick trees and then impenetrable trees and bush, and that doesn't suit animals that don't like that country and it certainly doesn't suit people, so they were constantly burning," he says.

The title of Professor Gammage's book comes from his discovery that English settlers all over Australia likened the land to the manicured estates of the mother country.

"There's [a] painting in my book in which... people looking at it now would say, 'well that's open forest', but the artist John Glover said 'this typifies the thickly wooded part of the country, and yet for us it's open. So if that was the thickly wooded; you'd imagine what the open and grassy country was like."

Click on audio to listen to the interview in full.

The four part documentary series, First Footprints, wraps up this Sunday on ABC1.